You’ve probably all heard that Indian Prime Minister Modi ordered two of the most common high denomination bills (500 and 1,000 rupee) out of circulation and that they would no longer be legal tender after only a few days. India’s economy is, well, not modern. Most people do not have or use credit cards. Only […]

There’s nothing surprising (at least to Clintonistas) that the Obama campaign has been using peer pressure and psychological manipulation to herd Democrats. But in light of Snowden’s revelations about the extent to the NSA’s reach into our private lives, the Obama campaign’s tactics are deeply disturbing. If you got an email from a suspicious sender asking you to surrender your address book and a lot of private information so he can harass your friends, you’d quickly change all your passwords and turn on two-step verification. But when it’s some 20 something Obama fan boy in a cave in Chicago doing it, we’re supposed to trust them?

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Jonathan Alter…there’s a story, the guy was an early supporter of The Invasion of Iraq, thought Rumsfeld was cool and early proponent of Obama. How early? 2003. I remember Jon, as he was known back then, calling me a fascist for supporting Ford’s pardon of Nixon as being a reasonable way to avoid a messy trial.

My positions have changed little in the intervening years, but as I am judged by others, I have gone from a “center-ist” to a radical leftist. Jon on the other hand has changed his positions like a fabulous follower of fashion changes his clothes. While Jon may call himself a “center-ist”, he’s gone from hard-radical left, to extreme right while being comfortably ensconced in the Democratic party.

Ok, put aside your feelings for alter for a moment. I didn’t link this interview in order to promote alter. I linked this interview because of what he wrote about the Obama campaign tactics.
Listen to the interview first. We’re not talking about alter here. In fact, he doesn’t seem at all disturbed at what he has discovered. And that’s what makes it all the more credible and creepy. He’s just reporting the facts and doesn’t seem to realize how deeply disturbing they are.
In other words, putting all your attention and ire on alter is really missing the point and could be seen as distracting.

The revelations in the press over the last couple of weeks have really changed my feelings about this administration – sure, establishment hacks, in thrall to the financial elites, trying to run away from everything distinctive about the Democratic Party. I always got that, but it fell into the category of them NOT doing a lot of things to make life in this country better and being the graveyard where reform went to die. Now, it really seems (especially with austerity in year 4 and counting) that they’re bent on making things worse, and in doing so in pretty strange, obsessively paranoid and creepy ways. It’s gotten to the point that, when Hastings died, my wife and I agreed that a part of us (admittedly minor, like 0-5 or 10%) was willing to entertain the possibility of foul play. Because when the people in positions of power just start doing stuff without really caring about rules or principles that might constrain them, where does it end? It’s actually getting more than a little scary and is starting to creep me out.

In the 1970s when Nixon was president and we still had 3 branches of Government and proud-functional journalists, the news of the last month would have been instantly labeled a constitutional crisis. Now, it’s just business as usual.

Did anyone get the Wes Clark email? He’s sending it as a representative of Ready for Hillary :

Running for president of the United States isn’t easy. I saw it first hand in 2003.
But what drives you. What pushes you. What makes you do more than you thought was possible are the supporters behind you.
I know from personal experience that having a group of supporters ready to go before I even jumped into the race made a tough decision much easier.
That’s exactly the message we need to send Hillary Clinton today. She needs to know that if she decides to run for president, then she’ll have an army of supporters behind her. I’m going to be Ready for Hillary. Will you be?
Can you make a $5 donation so we can reach 5,000 donors before the FEC filing deadline on June 30th and send a strong message that we stand with Hillary?”

We need someone with strength and experience and a commitment to Jobs for everyone, Cleaning up the economy, investigating and purging mendacity, jailing bankers, ending the wars, medicare for everyone, taxing the rich….

and this person probably needs to start pretty soon by campaigning for Congress/Senators who share that vision …. packing Capitol Hill with people who will stare-down current leadership of both parties, immediately initiating investigations and impeachment proceedings where necessary.

Preening Media Status Protectors have compromised EVERY principle of “Liberty and Justice for All” in the drive to preserve their access to the core of Chicago Political reality. They were shown early that to Question “the One” is to be replaced by more worshipful knee-benders.

Speaking of unsavory campaign tactics, what ever happened to all those charges of 2008 caucus tampering?

As to the cave thing, well somebody in the campaign was thinking out of the box. Go back to the Banking Scandal that Newt Gingrich used to blindside Speaker Tom Foley and wrest control of the House from the Democrats. Or the fact that it was a male republican and not Nancy Pelosi that converted an office near the floor of the House into a lady’s room. Queen Nancy had her porcelain throne and no regard for her sister House members. Dinosaur also begins with a D.

Anyway, using the same tactics as supermarkets offering shopper cards will be the new norm. Countering them will be a must for Hillary.

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Body: Last week I went down to Washington, D.C. to deliver a paper at a conference in the technical field where I worked, ten years or so and two or three careers ago, before the dot.com trash. The trip was solely an exercise in merit-making, since I doubt very much I'll get work in the field, but reconnecting with old friends was really great -- even […]

"Barrett Brown has been released from prison; WikiLeaks publishes to celebrate: Today, investigative journalist Barrett Brown has been released from FCI Three Rivers to a halfway house outside Dallas, earlier than initially scheduled. His parents picked him up from the federal prison to drive him six hours to his new residence. Brown's release come […]